From the course: Teaching with Technology

Why use technology to share content?

From the course: Teaching with Technology

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Why use technology to share content?

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- Why should we use technology to create, find, and share content? Overall, there are quiet a few reasons or benefits to consider, but I'll name just a few. Increased access. Increased flexibility. Increased accessibility. Increased choice. Technology can increase access to course content. Here's a story to make my point. I was working with a special education professor, whose was teaching a class on communication disorders. Overtime, she had collected amazing rare photos of peoples larynxes that were afflicted by different injuries, diseases, and other issues that impact speech. However, students had a hard time getting equal access to study the little flip book of photos before exams. I suggested scanning the photos and putting them online to provide all students with 27/7 access to the images. That was just one set of photos. Let's look at some of the traditional strategies for sharing content in a classroom setting. Text space information and materials include textbooks, readers, handouts, photocopies of journal articles, what you would write on the whiteboard in the classroom, and more. During class, you may all ready use technology to display visuals during presentations or lectures, show parts of documentaries, films, or videos, play parts of songs, recorded speeches, or foreign language phrases spoken by natives, and so on. You may have to consider digital rights issues for some of those resources, but technology also makes it possible to provided access outside the classroom. This helps students who missed class, or English language learners, or might otherwise need to review the resources again. Further, survey results have shown many students prefer to access content via one device, such as a laptop or tablet, then having to carry around a number of heavy books. Technology can increase your flexibility, such as how you use your face-to-face time with your students. For example, in another part of this course, I mention that even your lecturers are course content. Recording your lectures, presentations, are many lectures gives you options. Recording them during class is another way to provide access. Recording them before class can support flipping the classroom, where student watch the lecture in advanced and engage in learning activities during class time instead of the other way around. Technology can increase the accessibility of certain types of content, such as screen readers, which convert text to speech for people with vision impairments. If you record your own audio files, they'll be more personalized to your course. You may also consider captioning for those audio and video files. For example, YouTube now offers a basic speech recognition capability for video clips. Since the captions are never perfect, it 's possible to edit them. Technology can increase choice in how students consume your course content. In the first chapter in this course, I described Universal Design for Learning Principles, which include providing content in multiple formats. However, students have demonstrated that they prefer having a choice. Michelle Pacansky- Brock surveyed the students in her flipped community college class about their preferences for consuming course content. She found that 40 percent chose to read the lecture via transcript. 15 percent listened to the lecture as an enhanced podcast. 30 percent did both, often at the same time, and 15 percent alternated between reading and listening throughout the semester. As I mentioned, they're a variety of reasons or benefits to consider using technology to create and share content. We've just scratched the surface looking at access, flexibility, accessibility, and choice. Stay tuned for more benefits throughout this chapter. Before reviewing the next movie in this course, take a minute to answer the following questions for yourself. How can you use technology to increase access to course content, the accessibility of course content, flexibility for yourself or your students, and choice in how students consume course content?

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